Congo Square

Me and my boyfriend "Kunte Kente" spent a few of my birthdays in New Orleans, and I could tell by the way I had a feel for the city that I'd been there before, in another lifetime: the food, the music, the way I was greeted at the airport....this Acadian girl was home. Of course, I'm the original northern branch of a family tree that's stretched itself wide across this country we live in, though often not of our own choosing. The harsh heat and humidity endured by the Cajuns and Creoles who had settled in the bayou told me everything I needed to know about our history, because we're made for adversity. 

Still, the American South can be so very different from New York because of its deeply segregated past. When I took a road trip to Graceland in college, I'd never seen black folk order food from a diner just to eat it in a car parked in the parking lot outside of a restaurant. It was scary and strange to me. So, too, did New Orleans have that dividing line back in the late 90s, before the flood. I'd never seen poverty that sharply split between the fat white tourists in town, and the children who performed for them in the streets, with bottle caps on the bottoms of their shoes instead of taps.

Kent warned me that we'd be crossing more divides like the French Quarter's, if we wanted to see some of the prominent tourist attractions of New Orleans, and Congo Square was on our list of "must see" places. He and I met in a recording studio, and Kent worked as a professional musician before we met, sometimes during our relationship, too. I'd also studied the history of jazz and blues in school. Most of my music is heavy on the R&B and hip-hop, as well as the classics. We simply had to go see where it took root and spread out from the epicenter of the square to the rest of the world.

Instead of a dusty dirt square packed with drummers, we found a bunch of tidy bricks neatly arranged in a circle, and we were the only people visiting that day. The weather had turned a little rainy, though nothing frightening to us, so we spent some time walking the circles of stones in the pattern they're laid out in, like the beginning of "The Wiz" musical from Broadway. But, that wasn't the biggest part of our trip over there: it was first stopping at a dive bar to talk with a white-haired hipster about directions before we crossed a serious four-lane highway to the ghetto, before we walked past openly burning garbage cans in broad daylight and burned-out car wrecks abandoned by the side of the road, like New York City during the 70s and 80s. The dividing line between us and our destination was that clear, and that real.

Colored

The conversation about race and ethnicity can be a troubling game to the people who confuse it, because they lack proper cultural definitions within an appropriate context. I found myself in such a desert last week, watching a popular news entertainment show that highlights the most offensively outspoken headlines of the day. A prominent white news anchor used the word "colored" in her story about African-American issues and, like the jocks working the radio program that airs on t.v., I immediately took umbrage at her usage of it, too. What the...? Who the fuck is she? She don't know.

And then I remembered similarly odd conversations in my own past, where words can tumble out of control given the wrong situation, at any moment. Take, for instance, my meeting with a professor of English Literature during my time at Oneonta. He'd made some political references to his mostly "Anglo" class (or so he thought) of college students, about his supposed activism in South Africa with famous anti-apartheid movements that led him to flee the country to teach in our small po'dunk mountain town. Huh...really? He was handsome, so I dismissed him at the time for playing the adventurous romantic lead seeking to bed willing co-eds looking for a taste of the East, via one fucked-up African country and this state school educator.

He had a posh British accent that bespoke of his family's rather wealthy position in society through his obvious attendance at expensive private schools, and he had an irritating habit of wearing dopey silk ascots to go along with his condescension towards all things American that extended to decidedly less wealthy New York students, like me. I didn't think that much about him until a visit with my friend Donnel shook it up for me. We were still baffled by the death of her father while he was overseas in Ghana, and the subsequent disappearance of his body kept his whole family on edge, including me. According to their tribal customs, her mother needed to be in attendance to perform ablutions related his burial ritual, and they couldn't get any answers from the government or the state department about the events leading up to his death, leaving us in a paranoid "X-File" state.

There was talk of her father's assassination at the hands of some rival gangs with competing economic interests in their home village area which, given the general instability of many African nations, made more sense to us than we cared to admit. After he died, their financial circumstances drastically changed, revealing how deeply in debt their hereto presumed successful international businessman father was. During their foreclosure, our friend drove us past their house after school, to find deputies putting all of their furniture out on the front lawn, in full view of the entire neighborhood. "Just keep driving." Donnel said to us, crouched down in the back seat of the car. It was really disturbing. They moved to a smaller town home, and her mother began working as a low-end healthcare aide in a nearby nursing home to make ends meet, while we pursued various theories and connections to Ghana and Africa, no matter how bare or small.

During her visit to my college, I told Donnel about my English Lit professor with the supposed activist connections. Perhaps he could introduce us to a few of his contacts? We were desperate for any leads, and truth be told, I wanted to get a better look at him in private, to better feel out his intentions towards our student body. And so, one day after class, I made an appointment to see him in his office, a normal practice for any student seeking help, but totally rare for me. I'd never been to a professor's office before, and it was nerve-wracking to me, especially given the content of my errand. After I sat down in our semi-closed door meeting, I simply told him the truth. My friend's father had died mysteriously while in Ghana, and no one would talk to them about it. What to do?

He gave me a nasty look, then pointed to a map of Africa on his wall. You see, South Africa is there, and Ghana is here. See how faraway they are? Yeah, thanks. Asshat. But, you spoke in class about African geo-politics. Do you have any advice for my friend and her family about an agency that they can contact for guidance and support? He launched into another hipster diatribe about Apartheid and his status as a "Colored" man, because Indians (from India) were grouped in with "the blacks", and here he made a disgusted face like he smelled doggie doo-doo, which signaled to me that he was more upset about his classification as a minority in a faraway land than helping out poor black folks and their friends.

It was an astonishingly douchebag thing for him to admit to a student, especially since India has an extremely poor history of human rights, given the rigidity of their caste system of "Untouchables", but I was too stunned by his attitude to respond. I just wanted to get the fuck out of there, disturbed by the look of his purple tongue moving weirdly around his mouth while I had briefly talked. Back at my dorm room, I went over the exchange with my best friend from high school and college roommate, Karen, who was also navigating the rocky shoals of predominantly male academia as a history major; classes that often found her as the only female student in attendance. Here again, my heterosexuality counted heavily against me, as I described the shock of seeing a Chow Chow-colored tongue for the first time.

"You only went to see him because he's good-looking!" Well, yeah, but, no. I honestly wanted to help Donnel and her family, mired as they were in dire straits that I knew from my own mother's single parenting experience, a.k.a "My Mom Fell Apart Again": now performing a disastrous series of nervous breakdowns that we, as children and teens, were supposed to bear up under the weight of, and I wasn't sure how much more this family could take. She understood. Karen's parents (both dead for years now) were locked in horribly passive-aggressive co-dependence that saw her and her older brother begging them to divorce each other in lieu of an early grave, but you can read exactly where that got them. Nowhere. The stakes were so high for all of us to make it out of the messes they made for us, as a generation. They really needed my help.

After that, we took to calling him "Mr. South Africa" for his prettily-waved hair that was highlighted with a gay purple rinse, flatteringly cut just above his shoulders for that nouveau-hippie look, with his bevy of stylishly expensive ethnic-print clothing that fluttered around him like his many-layered Euro scarves, as the Indian answer to our naive prayers, while every AmerIndian on campus was probably just as interested in girls and hooking up as he was, because I howled at the midnight moon with them as a young pack member. It brought me back to talks around our kitchen table with my father growing up, as he explained to us that we're considered coloreds by society for first being Acadian, already a small ethnic minority, and secondly for our familial associations as Métis people.

I called my grieving friend from a pay phone on campus to tell her the bad news that I didn't get any information from the professor we could use (other than people around the world still hated us, which certainly wasn't new to us), and I never felt as frustrated and helpless as I did then, hanging up after a very brief conversation with my normally loquacious friend. I felt like I had totally failed her, in the face of some guy's arrogant assumptions about our society, but I was only 17 and a freshman. Now, I'm an expert in the media's weird and wild "Minority Reports", so old and out-of-date that they still think we're a bunch of simple black-and-white cookies they can split evenly in half, without the juicy red filling that beats at the heart of every American experience. It's time for a palette change.

Rarebit

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welsh_rarebit

My accent, like my looks, speaks strongly to my unique ethnic references, marginalized and ignored as they are, or (just as often) mocked behind my back. It's not exactly straight-up New York like an ignorant uneducated "guido", nor falsely pompous like a pseudo-Brit, or posh like a wanna-be WASP. It's Acadian, and it's Métis, and it's the Northeastern United States and the Maritime Provinces of Canada all wrapped up into one. It pre-dates other localized accents, like the land of Acadia did before the divides that bind us, as they currently exist.

Weirder still, it may be your exact kind of "suthin'" accent, Cajun, and that freaks out the down-home black folks even more: yo speakin' my accent, boy, and I mean that in the nicest way possible, because you are my heritage and ancestry, you just didn't know it, yet. Well, today you do. You mine, kid. In fact, all you Joneses and McNulty's are kin, too, whateva flava or color, because this mama don't care 'bout none of that, ya hear? You're alive to me. That's it. That's what counts.

But it's confusing, because it can't be easily mocked on a .t.v show by some bitch of an actress who "steals" from authentic people artistically, and that's a nice way to put it. It can't be deconstructed obsessively to pour into some flat-rate Hollywood starlet, either. They just ain't old enough as a culture to have it down right. You gots to be me! It changes on you, just when you think you have it down pat, because if you ain't me and my peeps, then you definitely don't have it. Sometimes it's New Brit, or Balmoral, or Brooklyn, or deep in da bayou...because that's all the flavor put in there just so.

It didn't really click together for me as a solid linguistic history told in words, stories, music, and cadence until I put my Scottish-British boyfriend back together with his native born folk and then BAM! His "mam" spoke of "movin' the cahr", just like they do is Bah-stin (that's Boston, in local-speak). Oh! Right! I'm from a place called "New Scotland". I would find that pleasant. My folk were easier to place, because my Brooklyn-born grandfather spoke like a character right out of "The Bowery Boys"*, an old entertainment bit done first on Vaudeville, and then in "the talkies". It fit. My mutha and her sistas speak with a dreadfully sharp and very unpleasant Bronx accent that's about as sexy as listening to a power drill whine loudly. Ugh.

The last piece of the puzzle came sharply into focus for me when I finally heard Welsh actor Christian Bale speak in his normal accent on a press junket for his fight movie, which must have knocked it right outta him. Aha! It was tough, street, and kinda foreign at the same time. Yeah! Like that! That's what we got: hard, rough, real lives told in an accent that puts us in the same company that can keep up. 

Out west, folks didn't quite know what to make of me, just like my voice. I was well-educated, but not forced about it. I was hip, but not some ghetto-ass "wigga". I was strong, but not full of arrogant bravado. I was lyrical, without being a pretend la-la land Disney character. I was deep, without being one drama class or Shakespeare reading away from a total drama queen doing Off-Broadway poorly. I was like Christian Bale in this here New World: an ethnic minority that spawned generations over time, space, and vast distances. Yeah, that's it. I'm real. Like a punch to the face. Deal with it. I know do.



* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bowery_Boys